Friedrich Langewiesche

Friedrich Langewiesche , son of the bookseller Adolf Langewiesche , (born May 26, 1867 in Elberfeld (now part of Wuppertal ); † December 2, 1958 in Bünde ) was a teacher, gymnast, collector, local researcher and naturalist.

Life

He spent his youth in Godesberg . There Langewiesche first attended a Protestant elementary school and later a higher private school. In the Untersekunda in 1882 he moved to the Evangelical Stiftische Gymnasium in Gütersloh , his mother's hometown. Here he passed the school leaving examination in 1886. Years of study in Halle (Saale) and Bonn followed . He joined the Christian student associations Hallenser Wingolf and Bonner Wingolf .

Langewiesche gained his first teaching experience as a teacher in schools in Bonn and Wesel . From 1894 to 1895 he took a position as an assistant teacher at a grammar school in Mülheim an der Ruhr . Then he headed the higher private boys' school in Versmold for a year from 1895 . Here he met Clara Tellmann, whom he married in 1896. In the same year he moved with his wife to Bünde and on April 1, 1896, he became a scientific teacher at the Protestant higher city school, which later became the secondary school. He was promoted to senior teacher and in 1909 to high school professor. In 1929, Friedrich Langewiesche retired as senior teacher at the age of 62.

After the founding of a district home museum in connection with the establishment of a tobacco and cigar museum in Bünde by the then mayor of the city Richard Moes on May 9, 1937, Friedrich Langewiesche initially took over the management of the district home museum. There he was able to accommodate his geological and paleontological collection , which he had gathered over decades . Richard Moes initially ran the tobacco and cigar museum , but had to give up this post after disputes with the city ​​council in Bünde, which was ruled by the NSDAP . Friedrich Langewiesche therefore also took over the management of the tobacco and cigar museum in 1939. In the same year he became a member of the NSDAP. He headed the facility, which was grouped under the title District Home, Tobacco and Cigar Museum, until 1951. After that, he gradually withdrew from public life, increasingly suffering from health problems.

In 1953 Friedrich Langewiesche was made the city's first honorary citizen by the city of Bünde and in 1956 he received the Great Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany .

Public person

Friedrich Langewiesche was a public figure in Bünde. He founded the Philologists Association Bünde and after the First World War a youth hostel and a local association of the German Youth Hostel Association . He joined the Beautification Association and was chairman of this association for 40 years from 1911. In addition to membership in the local Heimatverein, Friedrich Langewiesche was committed to the protection of local heritage and historical monuments in Minden-Ravensberg and was one of the founders of the Westphalian Heimatbund in 1915 . The committed professor also worked in the historical association for the county of Minden-Ravensberg. From 1902 to 1923 Friedrich Langewiesche was a member of the Bünder city council. In the year of his retirement as senior teacher in 1929, Friedrich Langewiesche was appointed shop steward for the preservation of monuments in Minden-Ravensberg by the Prussian Minister for Science, Art and Education at the suggestion of the Westphalian provincial administration. To preserve the Hücker Moor he campaigned in the “Nature Conservation Association for the Hücker Moor and Elsetal”. In 1938, the Bünde home and hiking club emerged from both clubs.

As a committed member of the local gymnastics club, he was soon appointed gymnastics warden in Versmold. In Bünde he joined the Bünder Turnverein and in 1930 became its chairman for 30 years. Then he became an honorary member and in 1933 honorary chairman. Up to the age of 75 he took part in the annual “Friedrich-Langewiesche-Treffen” of the over 50 year old gymnasts of the Turngau Minden-Ravensberg, named after him . Up until old age he was always one of the first to go into the swimming pool at the opening of the bathing season in the Bünder open-air pool.

Geologist and folklorist

Friedrich Langewiesche monument in the Wallburg Babilonie

Since moving to Bünde, Langewiesche has been fascinated by the Bünder Doberg and the fossils found there . In 1911 he and another collector found a 30 million year old toothed whale skull in Doberg. A year later he made the sensational discovery of an equally old manatee skeleton . Both finds were named by the Langewiesche scientific committees in honor of “Eosqualodon langewieschei” and “Anomotherium langewieschei”. In 1927 he donated the now more extensive Doberg collection to the city of Bünde. The collection can be seen today in the Dobergmuseum - Geological Museum Ostwestfalen-Lippe in Bünde.

Friedrich Langewiesche had intensive contacts with the universities in Göttingen and Berlin. He published numerous articles on geological issues and quickly made Doberg known beyond regional borders. In 1924 he became a member of the German Archaeological Institute in Frankfurt am Main. But the busy teacher was not only interested in geological topics, but also devoted part of his free time to research on antiquity and prehistory. As an employee of the Institute for Westphalian Regional Studies and Folklore, he also examined stone and urn graves as well as the La Tène period ramparts of Nammer Lager , Babilonie and Wittekindsburg in the Minden-Ravensberg area.

The politically committed homeland researcher

Pan-German Association

His numerous club memberships and his membership in the Bünder city council make it clear that Friedrich Langewiesche was a politically committed person. Shaped by the professional advancement to university professor from small backgrounds and his anchoring in the local circles of the urban educated bourgeoisie, his national-conservative ideas, which were expressed in his commitment to national and local issues, shaped. His later sympathy for the National Socialist ideology was the result of his political socialization. Langewiesche belonged to the Pan-German Association during his student days and after 1900 took over the chairmanship of the local branch of this association in Bünde. The Pan-German Association was founded in Berlin in 1891 as a non-partisan association and took a decidedly national course. The association's program included, in particular, the fight against all efforts that called the size of the German Reich into question, an imperialist colonial and naval policy and pronounced anti-Semitism .

At the age of 47, Friedrich Langewiesche would have liked to have fought as a soldier at the front when the First World War broke out, but a severe visual defect prevented him from doing so. His son Wilhelm remembered this time in 1967: “At the beginning of the First World War, my father regretted very much that he had not been a soldier because of his short-sightedness and that he could not join the army .” Friedrich Langewiesche was a nationalist who glorified the Wehrmacht . The national conservative Friedrich Langewiesche was not enthusiastic about the democratic development in the Weimar Republic . As a member of the Pan-German Association, Langewiesche moved in a gray area between monarchy and republic.

Steel helmet

When the Pan-German Association lost its importance in the shadow of the NSDAP in the 1920s, it joined the Stahlhelm . His political orientation gradually took on more militant features. The Stahlhelm, Bund der Frontsoldaten, developed as a warrior association after its founding in 1918 into a political group that resolutely opposed democracy. In the course of the 1920s, the steel helmets increasingly approached the National Socialist ideology. The Bünder Stahlhelm local group founded in 1923 was one of the largest local groups in the Herford district with 200 members. After the First World War, as a member of the Stahlhelm, Friedrich Langewiesche tried to support the preservation of military tradition and respect for the soldiery. Above all through his sporting ambitions, he found points of contact with the view of the armed forces association, "to awaken the will to fight in the pacifist-contaminated people".

German People's Party

Although fundamentally anti-democratic, members of the Bünder Stahlhelm worked in the city parliament, including Friedrich Langewiesche. After Bünde had resigned from the official association in 1902, he was elected to the city council, of which he remained until 1923. After retiring from the city parliament, he was a member of the right-wing liberal German People's Party (DVP) from 1926 to 1930 . In Bünde, members of the trade and the educated middle class shaped the politics of the DVP. The local party chairman, Friedrich Rumbke, was one of the most important opinion leaders in the city.

In the summer of 1933, the DVP dissolved. Many members joined the NSDAP. Friedrich Langewiesche hesitated to join the NSDAP. As a result, he lost his post as home area manager for Minden-Ravensberg in the Westphalian Heimatbund. Despite this punishment by the National Socialist rulers, Langewiesche approached National Socialism .

National Socialism

As early as 1935, Langewiesche's publication Symbols of Germanic Faith in the Wittekindland revealed the National Socialist style of his thinking. In the introduction of this narrow 82-page book, for example, it says: “Old heroic spirit has awakened again in our people and has chosen an ancient holy sign of salvation as a symbol for the struggle for the victory of the Nordic man and for the victory of creative work. “In the second half of the 1930s and early 1940s, Friedrich Langewiesche tried to adapt to the political system of the National Socialists in order to be able to pursue his local history work. The findings from his symbol study were incorporated into the work on the district home, tobacco and cigar museum after 1937.

Friedrich Langewiesche was certainly not a staunch National Socialist at the beginning of the 1930s, but for him homeland, nationality and race were not just terms of identification, but also, in the National Socialist sense, of excluding and combating certain population groups. The local history researcher Langewiesche adopted the political attitudes of the NSDAP in the course of the 1930s because they supported his interests. In 1939 Friedrich Langewiesche then joined the NSDAP. In addition, he applied for money through SS-Obersturmbannführer KH Weigel for his symbol research and received a total of 1,000 Reichsmarks from the German Ahnenerbe Research Foundation in 1937 and 1938 .

The positive attitude towards the National Socialist leadership was expressed in an unofficial, very personal obituary addressed to his friends and relatives for his son Fritz, who died in the Battle of Stalingrad in early February 1943 . In this letter, Friedrich Langewiesche speaks of "the blond, blue-eyed boy" to whom "loyalty to the Führer and fatherland (...) was a sacred legacy."

In other documents that the Bünder freeman wrote until 1945, it became clear that Langewiesche had largely made the Nazi ideology his own. It wasn't an isolated incident. The instrumentalization of the local researchers and associations in the sense of the National Socialist ideology took place in many cases through voluntary submission.

literature

• Johannes Großewinkelmann: So let's get down to work - everything for frets! The founding of the district home, tobacco and cigar museum under the direction of Friedrich Langewiesche . In: Kreisheimatverein Herford, Kommunalarchiv Herford (ed.): Historical yearbook for the district of Herford (2009) . Publishing house for regional history, Gütersloh 2009, ISBN 978-3-89534-736-8 , p. 8-40 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Friedrich Langewiesche in the catalog of the German National Library